Tag: co-design
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Growing cross-sector design collaboration in placemaking
The UK Government recently announced its Levelling Up plan aiming to ‘spread opportunity more equally across the UK’, and to narrow the social and economic disparities that exist across different places. Part of this plan is to give more power to local governments to regenerate their own town and cities. Placemaking is back on the agenda, […]
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Designing in partnership
This blog was co-authored by Abbie Jackson, Anna Ward-Stancheva, Georgy Holden, Leo Rees-Evans, Mar Reyes, Nicole Lotz and Rebekah Manston, all Design and Innovation students at the Open University. On June 25th 2020, the third annual exhibition of work of OU design students was launched. Every year, we invite students to design the exhibition together […]
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Co-designing a Makerspace with the La Campagna-Altamira Community in Mexico
I am just back from Monterrey in the north of Mexico, and can’t wait to share what I have done there. I worked on co-creating a Makerspace with La Campana-Altamira, an impoverished and marginalised community in the otherwise comparably wealthy city of Monterrey. Since the former Mexican president Calderon declared the Drug War, this low-income […]
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Beyond Buzzwords: the language of collaborative design
In collaboration with our strategic partners, The Glass-House Community Led Design, we recently organised and delivered an event to explore key terms used to describe collaborative design activity: co-design, co-production, participation and community-led design. These terms are used by some people interchangeably, while others assign specific meaning and kinds of practices to each one. To […]
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Design and social responsibility
There has been a growing recognition of the ethical and social responsibilities designers face, particularly within the design research community. Many of our current PhD students choose to grapple with problems or questions that affect society more generally, most notably sustainable production or sustainable living, as well as issues of representation, equality, justice and democratisation. […]
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From Design to Innovation and Enterprise
Trends on UK business start-ups are upward. Companies House data analysed by the Centre for Entrepreneurs showed that new records were set in 2016 with a total of 657,790 new UK businesses. This equates to 75 an hour! Many will be new design-based businesses. The Design Council’s 2015 publication ‘The Design Economy’ valued the contribution of the […]
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Design, Development and Impact of Sustainability Website Resources
More than ten years ago, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) funded the design, development and launch of Soil-Net, an innovative, open, online soil education website resource to support school curricula. Soil science has been under-represented in teaching National Curriculum in UK schools, despite recognition of soil as a major global natural […]
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Designing interactive distance learning in Nigeria
Dr Nicole Lotz and Dr Kerry Murphy recently led a two-day workshop on designing interactive, practical STEM Open Distance Learning (ODL) resources with the National Open University Nigeria (NOUN). The Dean of Science, Head of Applied Science and Director of Learning Resources from NOUN, as well as a delegation of OU and UK academics, explored opportunities for collaboration […]
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OpenStudio of the Future
We had a fantastic workshop today on how to facilitate progression in OpenStudio. We have reported on OpenStudio successes and scholarship before. This time academics and learning designers from the OU were invited to build on findings from our scholarship into OpenStudio to think about developments and improvements to the studio. At the workshop, we reported on […]
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Citizenship in the smart city
The suite of smart city standards recently published by the British Standards Institute attempts to legitimise smart city developments by placing citizens at the centre of them. Working with Simon Joss and Youri Dayot from the University of Westminster, I analysed the standards to try to figure out how citizenship might evolve in the smart […]